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US considered grounding some Boeing 737 MAX planes last year, source claims
- Federal Aviation Administration said to have known about a problem blamed on two crashes after the Lion Air disaster in Indonesia
- Boeing also didn’t tell Southwest Airlines – the biggest user of 737 MAX planes – that it had turned off a safety feature
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US regulators considered grounding some Boeing 737 MAX planes last year after learning of a problem with a system that is now the main suspect in two deadly crashes, a source close to the matter said.
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Investigators in the Lion Air crash in October off the coast of Indonesia and the Ethiopia Airlines disaster in March have zeroed in on the planes’ anti-stall system, called the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.
Last year, inspectors with the Federal Aviation Administration discovered Boeing deactivated a signal designed to advise the cockpit crew of a malfunctioning of the MCAS system, the source said.
The inspectors were in charge of monitoring Southwest Airlines, the biggest user of 737 MAX planes, with a fleet of 34 of them at the time, the source said.
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Before the Lion Air crash, which killed all 189 people on board, signals “were depicted as operable by Boeing on all MAX aircraft” regardless of whether the cockpit crew thought they had them turned on or off, said a Southwest spokeswoman.
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